Empty Mansions

and photos to Mrs. Marsh in California, and she would send them along to the artist in Japan. In a couple of years, the finished model would come back,at a price of $50,000 to $80,000. Huguette would give it a look, then it would go into storage at 907 Fifth Avenue. By then, she would have started half a dozen other projects. She went through a French Revolution phase and a religious house phase. She had Chris give photos of Bellosguardo, her Santa Barbara house, to a French designer so that he could make a miniature Bellosguardo as a French château dollhouse.
    “I never saw her unhappy,” Chris said. “She never appeared bored.”
    Not all the art projects were highbrow. Huguette gave Chris strict instructions about how to arrange her expensive antique Barbie dolls at the apartment for photo sessions. “She liked to have them set up in a certain way, certain poses.” Chris had to “dress and undress them in certain ways, have the furniture set up a certain way.” He would photograph the dolls in these scenes. It was too confusing, Chris said, to have too many dolls at the hospital, so she usually wanted him to bring only the photos.
    Chris stopped himself in the telling, protective of Huguette, realizing that he may be creating a certain impression. Clarifying, he said people might assume “because she liked these Barbie dolls, that there was something wrong with her. If you could have spoken with her, you wouldn’t think that. The most important thing here is that people respect Madame Clark.”
    • • •
    Chris also would bring Huguette her French magazines and newspapers:
Paris Match
for the European news and celebrities,
Point de Vue
fornews of the royal courts of Europe. She had a soft spot for royalty, swooning over old photos of Grace Kelly, following closely the Japanese tizzy in the 2000s over the lack of a male heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne, and expressing sorrow for France’s last queen, Marie Antoinette.
    Every day, Chris brought her French baked goods, usually brioche, the classic sweet bread made from flour, yeast, egg, butter, and milk. It seems like a simple recipe, but it’s tricky. The key is to chill the rich, buttery dough so it becomes elastic. “Believe me,” Chris said, “there is only a very small amount of stores in New York that sell fresh brioche and madeleines.”
    Chris also brought the mail from the apartments: bank statements and such, but what Huguette asked for was the auction catalogs for antique dolls and the new toy catalogs from Au Nain Bleu in Paris.
    Auction days for Huguette were “like a day at the racetrack,” Chris said. After every auction, her attorneys would write her a letter informing her that she had won. Like her father, Huguette was always the highest bidder. One attorney learned this lesson when he failed to win for her an antique Japanese painted screen; he ended up having to buy it with her money from the winning bidder at a higher price.
    And yet, when the dolls arrived and she would get a good look at them, she would often give them away to a doctor’s grandchild. Some of the dolls, she never unpacked. “She loved the auctions, the thrill of the auction,” Chris said. But she already had plenty of dolls.
    Chris said he counted at one point 1,157 dolls in her apartments, including more than 600 antique Japanese dolls, more than 400 French and German dolls, and dozens of the highly prized mechanical automatons: a nurse, a dwarf, clowns, giraffes, parrots, marionettes. One automaton owned by Huguette, made by the Jumeau Company in 1880, was a nineteen-inch girl who had blond hair and was wearing an ivory French frock. When a lever was pulled, the girl fanned herself and raised a book of fables to read.
    She had modern dolls, too: Barbie teenage fashion dolls from the 1950s on and Family Corners multiracial dolls from the 1990s. And she had the accessories, carefully organized by Chris on numbered shelves:Shelf 771 in her apartment was packed with minuscule lawn chairs and umbrellas. Shelf 772 had bedroom wardrobes and kitchen stoves.
    Chris was fiercely protective of Huguette’s privacy, screening her mail according to her instructions. Letters from friends went straight through. Others he would ask her about or send to the lawyers. He screened visitors, too. When one of her old friends started asking questions about the value of her estate, “Mrs. Clark didn’t like it,” Chris said, and that friendship cooled. Even Chris could